Hidden Folks

A charming and fun hidden-object game. For the most part it's pure hidden-object scenes, but some of the objects involve simple puzzle solving. Prompts for finding the objects are little hints, riddles, and puns. There is no time limit, so you can take as long as you want. It's perfect for playing at small increments. You can later return to the game exactly where you left it off.

The main source of delight in Hidden Folks is exploration of every nook and cranny of the scenes. They are teeming with details in the tradition called wimmelbilder, made famous in the English-speaking world as Where's Wally?, renamed to Where's Waldo? in America. Scenes comprise many little stories, presented via element composition and simple animations, which together create a complete little world. There are many jokes, quite a few Easter eggs, and "a ha!" moments as you realize what events came together to cause the current state of the scene.

Less delightful is the sound engineering. It's entirely "mouth" sounds: meep meeps, beeps and boops, groans and whines. For the first few minutes of play it's quite cute, but quickly becomes repetitive and annoying because the repertoire of the voice artist is very limited. The idea is cool, the execution terrible. It could have been successful had they hired someone with actual vocal talents.

At the time of this writing the game is not finished yet, but new scenes will be added at no additional cost. What a great idea! Much better than "early access," serial releases, and DLC. I hope to see more games released this way.